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paul cammack

AT TA C K I N G T H E P O O R

ictures of bright-eyed African children and smiling women in saris bedeck the World Banks website. Our dream is a world free of poverty, it proclaims, pledging to commit the Banks nancial resources, highly trained staff and extensive knowledge base to empowering the poor, through such irreproachable strategies as the pursuit of ethnic and gender equality, environmental sustainability, accessible primary education and widespread community health care. Inclusive development, pro-poor institutions and community initiatives are all invoked, differences respected, and inequality deplored. We at the Bank have made it our mission to ght poverty with passion and professionalism, putting it at the centre of all the work we do, explains the President, James Wolfensohn. The 4.8 billion people who are our ultimate clients deserve nothing less. Indeed, the Banks insistence on such high-minded goals has sent shock waves through the more hidebound sections of the IMF and US Treasury.1 A reading of the Banks agship annual World Development Reports since 1990, however, throws a very different programme into relief. Behind these apparently progressive aims there stands a commitment to a project that Marx once described as the entanglement of all peoples in the net of the world market; its principal object is to deliver an exploitable global proletariat into the hands of capital. This does indeed involve drawing the poorest of the worlds population into the workforce, providing basic health and education, and focusing particularly on young womenlending the process its emancipatory tinge. But the larger part of this strategy, in which its central logic is betrayed, is to deny the poor any alternative, and to create a reserve army of labour that will enforce the disciplines of capitalist labour-markets across the greater part of humanity. An analysis of the programme that unfolds within the suc-

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cessive World Development Reports, then, must begin at the beginning: with primitive accumulation.

A neoliberal revolution
In chapters 26 and 32 of Capital Volume 1, Marx sketches out two related processes: primitive accumulation, on the one hand, and capitalist accumulation on the other. The rstthe historical genesis of capital, its point of departureis dened as the process of divorcing the producer from the means of production. The secondwhich involves, among other things, the concentration of capital and the growth of the international character of the capitalist regimereects a world in which personally earned private property has already been supplanted by capitalist private property, which rests on the exploitation of alien, but formally free labour. It is, in other words, the process of proletarianization that brings the capitalist mode of production into being, by creating both capital and wage-labourers.2 All kinds of obstacles inhibit the tendency of the capitalist mode of production to establish itself on a world scale, and the process of primitive accumulation described here is still far from complete. The dening feature of global neoliberalism, however, is that it articulates, and seeks to implement, a strategy that will both hasten the process of primitive accumulationor proletarianizationand enforce the laws of capitalist accumulation throughout the enlarged space of the market economy. It portends, therefore, an epoch-making revolution.3 In this
See Robert Wade, Showdown at the World Bank, NLR 7, JanFeb 2001; and www.worldbank.org 2 As soon as capitalist production stands on its own feet, it not only maintains this separation, but reproduces it on a constantly expanding scale. The process, therefore, which creates the capital-relation can be nothing other than the process which divorces the worker from the ownership of the conditions of his own labour; it is a process which operates two transformations, whereby the social means of subsistence and production are turned into capital, and the immediate producers are turned into wage-labourers. Karl Marx, Capital, Volume 1 [1867], Harmondsworth 1976, pp. 8735, 9278. 3 In the history of primitive accumulation, all revolutions are epoch-making that act as levers for the capitalist class in the course of its formation; but this is true above all for those moments when great masses of men are suddenly and forcibly torn from their means of subsistence, and hurled onto the labour-market as free, unprotected and rightless proletarians. Capital Volume 1, p. 876.
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context, the World Banks outwardly progressive anti-poverty strategy, far from being a shift away from the neoliberal revolution, is a means to completing it.

Capitalist manifestos
What would a systematic programme for the establishment and consolidation of capitalism on a global scale look like? For a start, it would set about the conversion of the worlds poor into proletarians, stripped of alternative means of survival, and obliged to offer themselves to capitalists for work. It would then enlarge the scope for the private production of goods through the extension of markets, and the provision of an institutional matrix in which capitalist exchange could ourish. To secure the projects long-term viability, it would seek to ensure the preservation of the environment within which capitalism operates, not least by limiting the tendency for the forces of capitalist competition themselves to destroy it. Over time, it would orchestrate the delivery of appropriate numbers of people with sufcient health and education to be exploitable as workers. It would provide the infrastructure necessary for capitalist production, but not actually produced by capitalists themselves. Alongside these macrostructural elements, it would create institutional frameworks to ensure that workers behaved in such a way as to strengthen rather than to undermine the capitalist regime; that capitalists were nurtured, but at the same time compelled to compete against each other; and that states acted to support and expand domestic and international capitalism. Once these were in position, the programme would seek to promote a general acceptance of the global regime by manipulating information in order to favour pro-market solutions to the problems of further development, while mounting an ideological offensive to persuade the worlds population that there was no alternative. With all this in place, it would claim that the globalized free-market system offered the only solution to the problem of world poverty. Such a programme could well have been derived directly from the closing chapters of Capital Volume 1. As it happens, I have taken it from the sequence of eleven World Development Reports published by the World Bank since 1990. The rst of these, Poverty, called for the creation of a global proletariat from which labour could be efciently extracted, and sketched out a comprehensive framework within cammack: World Bank 127

which proletarianization could be accelerated.4 The second, Challenge of Development, advocated the vertical and horizontal expansion of markets, and set out a strategy for developing countries that assigned the state a vital supporting role.5 The 1992 Report, Development and the Environment, concerned itself with the need to preserve the global ecostructure in which capitalist expansion occurs. Investing in Health, the following year, proposed market-friendly mechanisms that might deliver a proletariat t for work. In 1994, Infrastructure for Development sought to extend the scope for prot-making in the provision of infrastructure, and to identify ways of meeting any remaining deciencies. Having addressed these macrostructural requirements, the Bank turned its attention to associated institutional frameworks. The 1995 Report, Workers in an Integrating World, looked at conditions that might facilitate the untrammelled exploitation of labour by capital across the globe. It ruled out minimum wage legislation in middle and low-income economies with large agricultural or informal sectors; proposed that health-and-safety legislation should be governed by market principles and set at a level where costs are commensurate with the value that informed workers place on improved working conditions and reduced risk; and it stipulated that trade sanctions were not to be used to enforce even the most basic workers rights. The Report then described the ideal
4 The evidence in this Report suggests that rapid and politically sustainable progress on poverty has been achieved by pursuing a strategy that has two equally important elements. The rst element is to promote the productive use of the poors most abundant assetlabour. It calls for policies that harness market incentives, social and political institutions, infrastructure and technology to that end. The second is to provide basic social services to the poor. Primary health care, family planning, nutrition and primary education are especially important. World Development Report 1990: Poverty, New York 1990, p. 3. 5 A central issue in development, and the principal theme of this Report, is the interaction between governments and markets. This is not a question of intervention versus laissez-fairea popular dichotomy, but a false one. Competitive markets are the best way yet found for efciently organizing the production and distribution of goods and services. Domestic and external competition provide the incentives that unleash entrepreneurship and technological progress. But markets cannot operate in a vacuumthey require a legal and regulatory framework that only governments can provide. And, at many other tasks, markets sometimes prove inadequate or fail altogether. That is why governments must, for example, invest in infrastructure and provide essential services to the poor. It is not a question of state or market: each has a large and irreplaceable role. World Development Report 1991: The Challenge of Development, New York 1991, p. 1.

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form that labour organization should take: trade unions strive to involve workers in activity that improves efciency and productivity; they should not act as monopolists or oppose programmes for structural adjustment and reform. Effective unions, from the World Bank point of view, eliminate the need for large-scale state regulation and intervention, and help rms to extract more surplus value from workers; they do not distort labour markets, or protect jobs.6 The 1996 Report, From Plan to Market, addressed the oundering postCommunist countries and, after a consideration of appropriate strategies for transition, laid out the necessary institutions of a market economy. Whereas the previous Report had addressed the need to subject workers to competitive labour markets, the focus here was upon creating a legal framework that would force capitalists to compete, through the denition and enforcement of property rights. Transition requires changes that introduce nancial discipline and increase entry of new rms, exit of unviable rms, and competition. Workers and capitalists alike were to be subjected to market rigour: the strategic objective of privatization was to reorganize ownership to respond to capitals needs.7 The 1997 Report, The State in a Changing World, returned to the role of the state in the new international capitalist regime, building on the succinct formulation the Bank had offered at the beginning of the decade.8 The stress now, however, was on the adoption and legitimization of this model, with the Report simultaneously providing the recipe for the disciplinary state and the rhetoric for selling it to the people. It outlined a
In many jobs workers are better informed than management about how to improve productivity. They will be more willing to share this information if they are condent of beneting from any resulting change in organization. The presence of an agent on the workers behalf, the union, may make them less suspicious that any information they reveal will benet only management. If the union involves workers in activities that improve efciency, unionism can be associated with a more productive organization. World Development Report 1995: Workers in an Integrating World, New York 1995, pp. 7480. 7 Economic laws in market economies have at least four functions: dening and protecting property rights; setting rules for exchanging those rights; establishing rules for entry into and exit out of productive activities; and promoting competition by overseeing market structure and behavior and correcting market failures. World Development Report 1996: From Plan to Market, New York 1996, pp. 44, 88. 8 See note 5: markets . . . require a legal and regulatory framework that only governments can provide.
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policy hierarchy in which macroeconomic discipline was guaranteed by strong central control over policy and spending, locked in place through an independent central bank, and further reinforced through subordination to multilateral organizations such as the IMF, the WTO and the World Bank itself. It then explained how discipline was to be spread throughout the system by building contracts and internal competition into direct public provision, and by contracting out to private and nongovernmental providers wherever possible. Within this framework, it assigned a triple role to strategies of decentralization and participation: these were to exert pressure on the state for the efcient delivery of essential services; to make sure that the costs of such services were shared with the beneciaries themselves; and to induce people to experience tightly controlled and carefully delimited forms of pro-market activity as empowerment: The message, here as elsewhere, is that bringing government closer to the people will only be effective if it is part of a larger strategy for improving the institutional capability of the state.9 The goal, then, was to bring government closer to the entrepreneur, and to lock the rest of the population into the discipline of the market.

Obscuring human agency


With the structural and institutional programme for the expansion and consolidation of capitalism complete, the following three Reports addressed the dissemination and legitimization of the project. The 199899 Knowledge for Development proposed the World Bank itself as the leading global collector and disseminator of developing-country intelligence, and touted its own knowledge-management system launched in 1996, along the lines of similar efforts pioneered by

Here the Report momentarily revealed the process of inversion involved in presenting capitals needs as if they were avenues to freedom, and exposed the fundamentally disciplinary character of strategies of participation and decentralizationmoving, within a single page, from the transparent assertion that Getting societies to accept a redenition of the states responsibilities will be one part of the solution. This will include strategic selection of the collective actions that states will try to promote, coupled with greater efforts to take the burden off the state, by involving citizens and communities in the delivery of collective goods, to the thoroughly mysticatory language of empowerment: making the state more responsive to peoples needs, bringing government closer to the people through broader participation and decentralization. World Development Report 1997: The State in a Changing World, New York 1997, pp. 3 and 111.

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international consultancies such as Arthur Andersen, Ernst & Young and Price Waterhouse. The Bank now offered itself as a rapid-response taskforce, capable of producing market solutions on demand. Matching the candour with which it had outlined plans to engage workers in their own alienation through increasing the rate of extraction of surplus value, and citizens in supplying, at their own cost, the infrastructural support needed by capital, the Bank now revealed the networks it had put in place to glean from the poor themselves the local knowledge needed to boost exploitation and accumulation.10 The next step was to depict the strategy of accelerating proletarianization and capitalist expansionpursued not only by the Bank, IMF and WTO but by the worlds leading governmentsas the authorless outcome of unexplained supernatural forces. At the same time, patterns of organization and behaviour intended to embed pure capitalist disciplines were represented as local forms of empowerment towards managing the inevitable change. The 19992000 Report, Entering the 21st Century portrayed globalization as an unstoppable force, inexorably driving states and peoples into the world market; and localization as a pressure from below, which would oblige governments to manage the consequences in accordance with regional needs.11 The project of

A recently launched initiative will expand the World Banks knowledgemanagement system to incorporate local knowledge from countries and sectors in which the World Bank is active. Gathered through eld interviews, participatory community assessments, and focus-group meetings with NGOs, this knowledge is being catalogued by country, region, sector and theme, to be made widely available to practitioners everywhere. By taking into account and complementing traditional practices in the least-developed countries, this approach should make knowledge available to far greater numbers of the poor. It may also ensure greater acceptance of development solutions. World Development Report 199899: Knowledge for Development, New York 1999, p. 140. 11 This report views the changes that have been set in motion as contributing toand as manifestations oftwo phenomena: globalization and localization. Globalization, which reects the progressive integration of the worlds economies, requires national governments to reach out to international partners as the best way to manage changes affecting trade, nancial ows, and the global environment. Localization, which reects the growing desire of people for a greater say in their government, manifests itself in the assertion of regional identities. It pushes national governments to reach down to regions and cities as the best way to manage changes affecting domestic politics and patterns of growth, World Development Report 19992000: Entering the 21st Century, New York 2000, p. 2.

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global liberalization was naturalized, described as a changing landscape whose contours required analysis if a way forward was to be found. With the project of world-market entanglement thus placed beyond the reach of human agency, the Banks policy stance could be presented as a benign and ideologically neutral pragmatism: development must move beyond economic growth to encompass important social goalsreduced poverty, improved quality of life, enhanced opportunities for better education and health, and more.12 The Report obscured the specic logic and limits of the policies proposed, and the role that participation and decentralization were to play in embedding domestic disciplines of capitalist reproduction. Macroeconomic stability was presented as the key to growth, which was in turn the open sesame to universally benecial development. This reversed a line of causation in which priority was actually given to capitalist accumulation, institutions were shaped accordingly, and the character of development was limited by market disciplines. The effect was to present a set of policies infused with the class demands of capital as if they were inspired by disinterested benevolence. The purposive action of human agents, bent upon establishing the hegemony of a particular social form of organization of production, was presented as if it were the natural outcome of abstract forces too powerful for humanity to resist. In its 20002001 Report, the Bank was thus able to return to its central mission of Attacking Poverty and to offer its programme for world capitalist expansion as the only means by which it could be addressed. Admittedly, the sights were not set very high: rather than abolishing the condition altogether, the rst goal was merely to reduce by half the proportion of people living in extreme income povertyi.e., on less than $1 a day.13 It has been suggested that the key ingredients of the Banks strategy here were empowerment, security and opportunity.14 On closer inspection, however, it would seem that reducing risk for private investment and expanding international markets are the real priorities.15 Within this macroeconomic framework, the poor are to be

Entering the 21st Century, pp. iii, 1. World Development Report 20002001: Attacking Poverty, New York 2001, p. 6. 14 Robert Wade, Showdown at the World Bank, p. 131. 15 Investment and technological innovation are the main drivers of growth in jobs and labor incomes. Fostering private investment requires reducing risk for private investorsthrough stable scal and monetary policy, stable investment regimes,
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allowed to participate at local level, and integrated into welfare systems so meagre that they do not undercut competitiveness.16

Extending povertys dominion


In 1990, the World Bank laid out its priorities for action on the question of poverty. The industrial countries were to roll back restrictions on trade and reform macroeconomic policy; together with the multilateral agencies, they were to increase nancial support for development, support policy reform, and encourage sustainable growth. The developing countries were to invest in people; improve the climate for enterprise; open their economies to trade and investment; and get macroeconomic policy right. Within this overall programme, the Bank did also call for developing countries to have unrestricted access to G7 markets; for increased concessional nancing of development; debt relief for middle and low-income countries; and common action to preserve the worlds environment. But in return, it demanded a programme of domestic reform: developing countries were to spend more, and more efciently on primary education, basic health care, nutrition and family planning; intervene less in industrial and agricultural pricing; deregulate restrictions to entry and exit; ensure adequate infrastructure and institutions; remove restrictions on trade and investments, lower tariffs and move away from discretionary forms of trade control; and introduce appropriate market-based incentives for savings and investment, in order to release domestic resources to nance development.17 Wades account of internal conict at the Bank suggests a fundamental difference of perspective between Joseph Stiglitz, then chief economist in charge of the World Development Reports, and US Treasury Secretary

sound nancial systems, and a clear and transparent business environment . . . Private investment will have to be complemented by public investment to enhance competitiveness and create new market opportunities. Particularly important is complementary public investment in expanding infrastructure and communications and upgrading the skills of the labour force. Attacking Poverty, p. 8. 16 Attacking Poverty, p. 11. 17 Attacking Poverty, pp. 1011. The World Bank has been outstandingly successful in securing the adoption of this programme by other international organizations and by governments around the world. In the case of the United Kingdom, for example, successive development White Papers produced by DFID in 1997 and 2000 adopt and promote the World Bank agenda in every particular.

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Lawrence Summers. From the beginning, however, the assault on poverty given pride of place in World Bank propaganda has been premised upon the adoption of policies that would extend the scope of the world market and the global reach of capitalism. In these circumstances, it is a mistake to approach the issues as they are posed within the mysticatory categories of bourgeois economics. The analytical framework of classical Marxism provides a better interpretation: under the guise of attacking poverty, the World Bank is attacking the poor.

Formerly the Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars Peer-reviewed quarterly journal, now published by Routledge. Articles, reviews, photo essays, translations, notes from the field. Indexed annually. Among the articles published in 2001 (volume 33): Challenging the Mandate of Heaven: Popular Protest in Modern China. Elizabeth J. Perry Occurrence at Nogun-ri Bridge: An Inquiry into the History and Memory of a Civil War. Bruce Cumings The Battle for History after Suharto: Beyond Sacred Dates, Great Men, and Legal Milestones. Gerry van Klinken The Reischauer Memo: Mr. Moto, Hirohito, and Japanese American Soldiers. Takashi Fujitani Thematic issue (vol. 34, no. 1): Transnational Labor Migration in the Asia/Pacific/Indian Ocean Region, Donald Nonini, guest editor Free sample: email managing editor Tom Fenton <tfenton@igc.org>

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